Humour Translation In Animated Series From The Relevance Theory Perspective ——A Comparative Study Of The Loud House’s Subtitled And Dubbed Versions In Chinese

Humour has been attracting the attention of researchers on translation and cross-cultural communications for a long time.It is the globalisation and the global cultural communication that have made the audiovisual humour translation（AVHT）a hot issue once more.The relevance theory（Sperber,Wilson 1986）has been developed and completed later by Gutt（1991）and Yus（2003,2012）to achieve remarkable results in humour translation studies.Under this back ground,this thesis attempts to examine the audiovisual humour translation（AVHT）in The Loud House,an American popular animated series,from the relevance-theoretical perspective.By analysing a total of 130 cases of humour（including 72 cases of verbally expressed humour）in four episodes,the author aims to explore the distribution of all types of humour in The Loud House,and the differences between subtitled and dubbed versions in terms of translation strategies and their validity in dealing with all types of humour.From the quantitative and qualitative analysis,it is safe to draw the following conclusions:1.In The Loud House,universal humour and wordplay take the majority,only a small number of culture-based humour are found in animated series（where the frequency of cultural humour is lower than in most of American sitcoms）,due to the young age of the targeted audience and the topic around family issues.2,All the six translation strategies（Transference,Equivalence,Substitution,Neutralisation,Compensation and Omission）are used in audiovisual humour translation.Subtitling is normally a better approach to humour translation in The Loud House than dubbing.3.Being subtitled or dubbed version,Transference is the preferred tool that translators resort to.When Transference cannot help,Equivalence and Compensation are usually good options in subtitled translation,while Neutralisation and Substitution are used more often in the dubbed translation.This paper explains the realisation of the humorous effects in the cartoons with the relevance theory,and the selection of translation strategies in the subtitling and dubbing translation practices.This research intends to promote the understanding of humour in animated series and to throw light on humour translation practices.Hopefully,it can also enlighten the development of the relevance theory approach to translation studies and the overseas dissemination of Chinese cartoons.